On 5 February 2014, Vice-President Almunia announced the third iteration of Google’s proposed commitments to bring an end to the Commission’s investigation into Google’s online search and advertising business. This announcement followed a period of particularly intense negotiations and, unprecedentedly, two market tests of two previous iterations of the Commitments text. The text has changed substantially since the first version was published on the Commission’s website on 3 April 2013, though the principles underlying the proposed remedies remain the same. The Commission is expected to adopt a decision under Article 9 of Regulation 1/2003 approving the revised text in the summer of 2014. Perhaps inevitably, the revised commitments have met with vocal criticism from complainants. For the most part, complainants have criticized the ‘vertical search’ component of the commitments, which is by far the most contentious aspect of the case. This editorial does not seek to assess in detail the merits of the Commission’s preliminary concern with respect to Google’s alleged ‘dominance’ in free online search (which, on its face, is inconsistent with the Commission’s findings with respect to free services in itsMicrosoft/Skype decision, recently upheld by the General Court). Nor does it seek to address the Commission’s preliminary concerns relating to vertical search (which Google continues to contest, and which have been rejected by regulators and courts worldwide, including the US FTC, and EU Member State Courts, such as the Hamburg District Court). Rather, this editorial addresses the legally relevant question raised by the complainants’ criticisms. Namely: do the commitments adequately address the Commission’s stated preliminary concerns? The answer to this question is a clear ‘yes, and then some’. Regulation 1/2003 expressly limits the role of Article 9 commitments decisions to remedying the ‘concerns expressed . . . by the Commission in its preliminary assessment’. The commitments text as it now stands goes much further than anything that possibly could be required of Google, as a matter of law, to address the preliminary concerns the Commission has stated, and provides rival vertical search sites with an additional, highly valuable opportunity for promotion on Google. Even if complainants are still not satisfied, as the Commission’s Manual of Procedures states, a market test ‘is not an opinion poll which determines the fate of the remedies’. Moreover, Article 9 commitments cannot be used as a vehicle to address additional areas of concern, regardless of how vocally complainants may express them in market test responses or other public fora. To understand the commitments, it is essential to understand the scope of the Commission’s preliminary concerns, which arise from complaints from ‘vertical search’ websites. Such sites operate within narrow socalled ‘vertical’ areas of interest, such as products, restaurants, hotels, and the like. In contrast, generalist, or ‘horizontal’ search services like Google, Bing, or Yahoo!, aim to provide results for all categories of information. The complainants alleged that Google was leveraging a dominant position in a user-facing ‘market’ for ‘horizontal search’ to user-facing ‘markets’ for ‘vertical search’ through two principal means. First, complainants alleged that Google ‘manipulated’ its search algorithms to ‘demote’ links to their sites in Google’s web search results (the ranked set of ‘blue links’ visible on a Google search results page). Following the publication of the revised commitments, complainants are raising such concerns again, but the Commission has thoroughly investigated and roundly rejected these allegations already (indeed, Vice-President Almunia has explicitly stated that the ‘objective of the Commission is not to interfere in Google’s search algorithm’). The US FTC similarly unanimously found these allegations to lack any factual basis. Second, complainants alleged that Google forecloses competition by displaying its own specialised results for